Note: This post inspired by Gizmodo’s feature on what our dads taught us about tech.

My father didn’t enjoy gadgets for gadgets’ sake. He bought fish from Nova Scotia, Iceland, Florida, and other places a long way from our home in upstate New York. He and a handful of employees cut it all up and sold the filets. He grew up in rural Long Island, then on a working upstate farm, and couldn’t type beyond finger pecking. Still, the very first device I can ever remember thinking was amazingly cool–or whatever equivalent of “cool” a 6-year-old had in the mid-1980s–was a tiny device he held up to the phone receiver at five in the morning.

It was roughly the size of today’s iPhone, though small in my dad’s gargantuan hands. The label read “Radio Shack,” it was sharp-edged and brown plastic, and it had a big speaker under its flip-open cover. If you slid open the case in the back, there were lots of switches, and maybe even transistors. The main magic, though, was when my father would pick up the kitchen phone handset, hold the speaker up to it, and generate a series of squawks and beeps. When the analog argument was over, he’d maybe punch in a few numbers, then put the device away and start talking. “Jim? Rick Purdy. I need Icelandic Cod by Thursday …”

I picked up my tech obsession, indirectly, from my dad’s cast-offs. After he sold off and closed Statewide Foods the first time, to try a white-collar job and spend more time with his kids, I inherited his office’s bookkeeping computer. It was a Gateway 486DX-33, “Turbo” switch and all. I installed Windows 95 when it arrived from a dozen or more 3.5″ floppy discs. I upgraded it with a CD-ROM (4x) and sound card (Creative, 16-bit) for proper gaming capacity, but then had to check out every single Windows setting, BIOS switch, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT script, and potential hardware problem when System Shock wouldn’t stop crashing with a terminal-type “Divide Overflow” message. In the end, the culprit was an obscure BIOS setting that put the hard drive into a necessary “Turbo” mode. I will never again buy, name, or accept anything in my life with a “Turbo” label–ever.

Cut to 2010, and I’m a 29-year-old writer who earns his wages detailing the kinds of work-arounds and system fixes that filled my formative years. Interviewed by the local alternative weekly, I brought up that brown box of my father’s. I mentioned it again in my next phone call with my father, and he explained the mystery I’d managed to never directly ask him about.

The device was a Radio Shack tone dialer, and he discovered it in the world of long-distance brokers. It was a kind of “red box” phreaking tool. Rather than pay then-monopoly rates to AT&T/Bell/NY Telephone for long-distance calls, the tones and squawks from the device activated something deep within the local phone switching station, which in turn connected and authorized him to use his own much cheaper carrier to call Iceland, Canada, or wherever he needed fish from.

The conversation about the “brown box” was the last I’d ever have with my father. He passed away on March 23, 2010. A heavy manila envelope had arrived four days earlier. Inside was a brown, dust-flecked device, with a speaker and all the switches still set up.

Every generation thinks they’re the first to stumble across everything. I’m typing this from a smartphone tethered to my laptop to avoid Panera’s unusable lunchtime Wi-Fi. My dad was sneaking around legitimacy to get things done long before his son.

Over a long weekend in September 2007, and right before I sent an overly earnest pitch letter to the editors at Lifehacker, I created this web site so that I might appear impressive, experienced, and engaged in the wider world of tech.

Once I’d made the jump to being actually engaged as a full-time, at-home, independent editor and freelancer, I made updates to the site so as to appear busy and important. Once I was busy, and at least self-important, I wanted to appear responsive, involved, and all kinds of quirky.

These days, I have no time to appear anything at all. Or appear most anywhere, unless it’s tangentially work-related or deductible from taxes. Free food, sure, but otherwise, no dice.

This is, as The Wire’s Marlo Stanfield put it, “One of those good problems.” Still, I occasionally get time to look back over my shoulder and notice how much space I’ve put between myself and this site, and its original aims at being about me, my interests, the people who share my interests and earn my respect, and the place where I live.

Oh, well. This update mostly keeps the pace down that same, singular street, but let’s hope it’s the last block before I turn the corner again. Having pounded that extended metaphor into the pavement (meta!), let’s get to the new stuff about me, me, me:

Writing a book: The Complete Guide to Android. There is nothing to show at this point, and nothing’s ever certain. But I’m sure trying to get something done, in the vein of Gina Trapani’s Complete Guide to Google Wave, with the topic being the rising Android smartphone OS from Google.

This Week in Google: We all listen when Gina suggests something, and she was kind enough to suggest to the host of This Week in Google that I appear to talk about a Top 10 Android Apps post, and other topics related to Android. So I plugged in my webcam, sat my headset on my ears, and had more fun than I’ve ever had with a camera on me.

You can grab audio and (soon) video from that episode, “Perky Jerky,” at the site. If you dug the topics and talk, subscribe to This Week in Google from iTunes, or head to the show site for other feed options. I get through it every week, often while cooking or watching dishes. It’s like having some really nerdy, wonderful friends let you join them at their tech table.

Nickel City Chef:

As you might imagine, it’s a Buffalo-focused take on the Iron Chef (America) phenomenon, with two chefs–one a “Nickel City Chef” from Buffalo, the other a challenger–competing, on deadline, to imaginatively incorporate a secret ingredient into several dishes.

I was asked to represent Buffalo Spree magazine as a judge at the first regular season throw-down, and I gladly accepted, since tickets last year sold out before I could think twice about it. Adam Goetz from SAMPLE took on challenger Ross Warhol, executive chef at the Chautauqua Institution’s Athenaeum Hotel, with the secret ingredient being whole milk ricotta cheese from Sorrento, itself headquartered in Buffalo.

Via Nickel City Chef [Facebook].

The highlights:

• Learning that local NPR morning host Bert Gambini doesn’t look anything like he sounds. I’ve had similar “radio voice/image dissonance” revelations about folks like Brian Ibbott, but, seriously–Bert Gambini sounds like your toy-train-collecting uncle after enunciation lessons, but looks like he could lift your car if you dropped your wallet under it.
• Eating ricotta as a powder steeped in Earl Grey. Probably won’t ever get to do it again.
• Learning how to think fast, faster, fastest about what I’m eating, as the microphone lands in my face. Mention was made of “a chocolate bar left just a minute too long in the back of a station wagon,” though.
• Eating all that food, meeting the chefs, chatting with friends after, learning how hard it is to talk about food.

Artvoice’s 5 Questions With … Were asked of me. My dad later informed me that the “little brown device” he carried around was actually a signal emitter that let him use his own long distance service over AT&T lines. Which is kind of neat, to learn your dad dabbled in phone phreaking while you were wolfing down Honey Nut Cheerios.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: Interviewed me for a feature, “‘Life hack’ aims to boost productivity in workplace.” Steve Twedt was great to talk to, and genuinely interested in learning about the roots, range, and regular uses of all kinds of things Lifehacker-ish.

CBS3 Philadelphia: Did a video Skype interview for a feature on resolution-keeping apps.

Yeesh. I feel like I’m about to drown in the internet equivalent of a very still pond. With all that What I’ve Been Up To out of the way, though, I aim to write something else next time. Something with cheese, perhaps.

I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya. Long time, like, since before the national health care debate started. Long time like, I still lived in Rochester. Long time like, everybody still thought the Bills had a great passing game ready to roll out.

So! Here’s the notable stuff. I’ll skip the minutiae of professional/Lifehacker-related material, since I should really be a good “personal brand” and round that stuff up on the professional page.

• I got to eat at Shake Shack. Oh, don’t get me wrong, it was part of a very nice two-day jaunt to New York City, wherein I got to work at the Gawker office, see three old friends, and enjoy Manhattan in the not-too-cold-to-walk fall. But I’ve been fiending for this particular combination of meat, sauce, bread, and greenery since I posted about making your own at home. It did not disappoint. Honest food and good ingredients, cooked well and served up straight, and I’m totally in love.
• Among other media appearances, I was quoted in the Wall Street Journal, following a very fun interview with Alexandra Levit. This is important mostly because the WSJ is something my parents and relatives can say they’ve actually heard of, so family get-togethers now have one gimme conversation point.
• My wife and I moved back to Buffalo, so now I’ve got new home office digs and an endless tab at Home Depot. I miss many things about Rochester, but overall, it’s been great to get back to the business of shivering, connecting, and eating with the great people here.
• Having settled in a bit, I’ve been writing material for Buffalo Spree (ooh, new web site!), a twice-monthly tip column for ITworld, and the occasional piece somewhere else, like Popular Science.
• I have started watching The Wire, sequentially from the first episode, for the third time. This is notable mainly because it represents an approximate, cumulative total of 150 hours dedicated to the study of this five-season masterpiece, being early into Season 3, and not counting Season 5 episodes I totally watched twice, because I downloaded them early and then pretended I hadn’t when they aired on HBO, which I subscribed to solely for the purpose of getting on-demand Season 5 episodes, and yes I’m aware this is a comically overlong sentence.
  
  Since you asked, yes, I find Season 2 to be vastly underrated, and Season 3 to be very loose and faulty at points, despite having two of the strongest plot arcs (Hamsterdam and Stringer Bell’s quest to “go straight”). I could certainly go on–and I have in the past–but let’s just say that I’m very eager to discuss this with you at any point when we meet. Midway through your surgery? Tie off that morphine drip, fellow watcher, and let’s get down to brass tacks.

I’m really enjoying my guest stint on The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC, public radio for New York City. When someone, be it a host or caller, forces you to actually talk about something you write about every morning in short bursts, it brings a new kind focus to it. You’re forced to think about the most commonly applicable aspects of technology and productivity thinking–what I like to call the “Brother-in-Law Test” (more on that some other time).

Since I know you’re crushed to have missed the segments when they originally aired, they’re embedded below: Aug. 13, talking about web applications and universal capture tools, and the Aug. 20 segment, focused on email.

I’ve been on two different WNYC morning radio shows in the last month or so, talking up Lifehacker-type topics and describing how I watch TV (without cable) and get things done (when I can).

First up, an appearance on The Takeaway with John Hockenberry to talk about living “Life After Television,” i.e. switching away from cable to streaming net content (and over-the-air DTV). Click the play icon below to listen:

Next up, I was asked to take part in a month-long series of segments dealing with productivity on The Brian Lehrer Show. The first segment was this morning, and I should be on again every Thursday in August, around 10:40 a.m. Here’s the embedded clip–hit “More” in the upper-right corner for a download link, if needed:

I’m glad I was able to score another invite with my elite plugging skills near the end. But, seriously, I do listen to On The Media nearly every week. Because I was popular in high school.

I was lucky enough to be interviewed at Rochester’s local NPR affiliate, WXXI, for its weekly Mixed Media segment. You can hear my 13:48 of audio fame in a full, streaming podcast; the version that plays on actual air waves (July 1 at about 3:44pm, methinks?) will be much shorter. It’s mostly a soft, slightly rambling introduction to Lifehacker, as well as some honest answers about what it’s like to blog for a living.

I tend to do two things when I’m talking on the spot: use many more “um” verbal placeholders than I would in casual conversation, and, to put it nicely, venture off the path with my answers to straightforward questions. The latter is somewhat inherent to how I think, but the former is something I could use some help and training on. If I find great resources online, I’ll share ‘em; if you’ve got any tips for a neophyte interviewee, let me know with a comment.

Personal blogging is hard when you’re updating another blog at least five times per day, and often more. As I put it to my editor recently, it feels like my Who Cares Filter is completely closed up by the time I find myself with time to write in this space. I don’t have to write about software, productivity, gadgets, or time management here, of course; it’s just a vague feeling that I’ve linked and updated everything I need to on the net each day.

But! Now it’s way too early on a Sunday, and I’ve got a few things that need sharin’.

• The headline: Yep. Less than six months after moving to Rochester, the wife and I are moving back to our home of more nine years. I defer my feelings on this to an upcoming Roc/Buff open comparison chart I’ll be posting (seriously) later this month.
• Food Week at Lifehacker: That was seriously fun. I earned some experience doing solo video shoots, interviewing Art Rogers of Lento restaurant about slicing and dicing onions and fileting a fish.
  
  What did I learn? Per @jordanconway, I might find a bolt that fits in the tripod mount of my Zi6 and attach it to a lanyard for steadier shots. When shots go wrong (”Macro Mode” my butt), I’ll politely ask my subject to back up and re-explain, and I’ll keep the camera on the subject (food!) more often.
• Rockin’ the G1: Finally joined the realm of folks who can complain about two different kinds of cellular reception. I dig the open nature, the browser is pretty snappy when the bandwidth’s there, and certain apps are total killers (Locale, for one). Many reviewers and iPhone purists have knocked on the hardware, but I see a clear trade-off for the “bulk” and “design choices.” Namely, having 3.2 megapixels in your pocket at all times, to shoot ridiculously clear photos and video:
  
  
• Firefox add-ons for journalists: Titled Journalist Picks for now, and it’s a work in progress. Got an extension that would help with research, note-taking, or tracking beat subjects online? Drop them in the comments or hit me up on email.

Want to help me round this out? I’m not a Buffalo/Rochester native, but a (nearly) 10-year veteran; this is just a quick thumbnail I dashed off. Leave your track suggestions in the comments, and I’ll update the playlist embedded above. Click the upper-right corner button for a bigger view.

What am I looking for? Songs that ring true with the WNY experience; hence “Livin’ on a Prayer,” which I’ve never seen fail at a Buffalo bar or concert, and which has lyrics that, sadly, resonate pretty well. Local artists and directly-related songs are great. Nearby Canadian stuff is cool, too. But I’m just looking for a wide net to cast around the music that defines the region.

Edit: Commenter Knile points out that this came up on MetaFilter last month, unbeknownst to me (but awesomely helpful).

(Disclosure: This awesome app was made by my boss at Lifehacker)

Thanks to Kevin Lim for shooting and posting, and to BarCamp Buffalo for letting me try out an alpha-level presentation on the late-night crowd.

I’d intended to run through three areas early-morning bloggers can use to sprint through material and write faster, but ended up focusing on one app I could easily keep in the 10-minute time frame. Intrigued? Check out the full list of tools and tricks referenced at the end of the vid.

The Big Kahuna

• Firefox – Like you really needed this link. Pass it on, though.

Add-ons

- These you may find a bit more unique.
• AutoCopy – Never bother with Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V while writing again.

• CoLT (Copy Link Text) – Create customized HTML wrappers for the links you’re grabbing, so you don’t have to write out all that “a href” gizazzle (unless you really feel like a code king doing so).

• Enter Selects – Gives Firefox one of Google Chrome’s coolest features–the ability to type out part of a bookmark name, then just smack Enter to jump to it. It’s part time saver, part stress reliever.

• Speed Dial – Use a grid of your most-visited web sites as your home page, or “new tab” page, then use Ctrl+number to fly between them.

• Xmarks – Synchronize your bookmarks between all your browsers. Find something to write about at work while you’re at home? Just drag it onto your toolbar, and you’re done worrying.

Bookmarklets

• Subscribe in Google Reader (head to “Settings,” then “Goodies,” scroll down toward bottom) – Set up a Firefox hot key for this, and quickly add whatever site you’re looking at to your Reader queue.

• Bit.ly creator - Short URL service that tracks who’s clicking on your links.

Software tools

• Launchy - Open programs, search the web, control windows–do nearly anything from a quick-smack keyboard launcher.

• Texter - Text replacement app that fills in all that crap you don’t want to write–addresses, signatures, weird HTML. It also fixes your specific spelling problems and can do AutoHotKey-style keyboard combinations.

Obligatory but Relevant Lifehacker links

• Top 10 Tools to Get Blogging Done – Covers some of the same ground as my talk, but gets a bit more geeky for the link-and-comment set.

• Getting good with Google Reader - Just what it sounds like.

• Trick out Google Reader with Better GReader – Our own Firefox add-on for tweaking Reader to behave the way you want it to.